


what happens in the silence when 710 kHz WOR goes dark

by ballantine



Category: Band of Brothers (TV 2001)
Genre: 1947, Blackmail, M/M, On the Run, Post-War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:56:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27564163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ballantine/pseuds/ballantine
Summary: Lew doesn't have a plan, is what's funny here.
Relationships: Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters
Comments: 5
Kudos: 24





	what happens in the silence when 710 kHz WOR goes dark

**Author's Note:**

> For some reason I can't watch any noir film without thinking about winnix. I blame Nix's smoking habit.

` _Well, honey, why don't you call me your Ronson Girl—  
Oh, really?  
'Cause I'll be the light of your life!_   
`   
  


There are three people in the diner: the cook, the waitress, and him. But the only voice belongs to the radio behind the counter, and it is just loud enough to be hard to ignore.

Lew doesn't have a plan, is what's funny here.

Plans are supposed to be his thing. Even when he was determinedly drinking his way into a demotion during the war, he was considered a pretty good intelligence officer. He used to dream in plans: lines of power glinting up fool's gold on mental maps, his half-asleep, half-boozed mind unable to leave any of it alone. _First we take Antwerp, and dig in...._ In sleep, Nix must've had the 506th jump on Berlin and win the war for the Allies fifty times.

But plans are something his mind devised for other men, other lives. On the topic of his own, it is usually silent. Washed its hands and abdicated all responsibility long ago (that's the Stanhope in it).

So he doesn't have a plan now, and it's funny. He is probably the only one who would find it funny. Guess you had to be there.

  
  


` _The subject is animal, and you have twenty questions to get it.  
Is it a living American man?  
No._ `

  
  


Where is he?

Dick has been asked this question five times by three separate people. He has asked it himself, to the empty air in the house he shared with Lew fifteen minutes away from the nitration plant in Nixon, New Jersey.

No information is better than bad information, so he says little and stifles his frustration with the empty air. He can't shake the feeling that he has something to do with Lew's absence. When he searches his mind he comes up with nothing substantial, but Lew's been off for a while now. Whenever they are in the house together lately, it always feels like there is something in there with them, just out of eyesight.

Lew took his car. There is no sign that it or he had been at the plant in the previous twenty-four hours – yesterday was a Saturday, so no reason he would have been. But the same thing could be said of Roberts, the floor manager found dead Sunday morning, stiff from a night cooling on the concrete; the blood that hadn't seeped out from his fall now settled like river sediment at the base of his body.

The police asked Dick to stop by and answer some questions: routine, for context. So Dick pulled on his jacket, left off the tie, and headed to the station.

They asked Dick to come down, and he complied, but now they keep him waiting. He doesn't like waiting, but after the Army he never lets it show. He supposes this is why people take up smoking. Something to occupy their hands, to pass the time. Lew has never been a nervous smoker. It seemed he could go hours or even days without a cigarette. Dick had never worked out the rules for it; what made a moment a cigarette moment.

The sergeant at the front desk had a radio on to pass the night along.

  
  


` _Is the word we want worm?  
Yes.  
Is this the worm that turns?  
No._ `

  
  


Lew exhales a final, thin line of smoke and stamps his cigarette out.

Even with the hour and the minimal crowd, the waitress hasn't been around to empty the counter's ashtrays. The one closest to him had been a quarter full when he sat down. With Lew's steady deposits it has been quickly overwhelmed, cigarettes tapped out over the crumpled stubs of their brothers. Ash flecks the mint green formica in an unsteady semicircle around the tray. He wipes it away from him with the pinky side of his palm. He doesn't want to leave a trail.

He's had two cups of coffee, neither of which he remembers tasting. Which is probably just as well. He smiles for the waitress as she tops off his cup. She doesn't notice. It's too late in the night for strange men's smiles. He needs a shave.

He lights another cigarette. His hands perfectly steady, which is how he knows he is in trouble. He looks down at the newspaper he's been trying to bring himself to read for the past half-hour.

Half the page is taken up by the backend of the 1A story, something about everybody's high hopes for the As this year. But he isn't interested in that. He only has eyes for the small column squeezed between the main story and an ad for motor oil. Two cramped paragraphs, filler ripped from the Associated Press by some deadline-terrorized newsman in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

He sips the refreshed coffee, scorches his tongue. Runs his thumb along the soft edge of the newspaper and forces his eyes to actually focus on the story. He finally reads it and his cigarette has burned perilously close to his fingers by the time he finishes.

Inconclusive, his mind supplies. The police haven't ruled it a murder, but the article doesn't call it an accident either.

“Miss?” Five feet away, the waitress shifts off her elbows and blinks up from her paperback. Christ, she's young. What's a kid doing working the graveyard shift at a road diner in the middle of nowhere? He was going to ask after a nearby motel, but suddenly the question feels risky. Like she'd remember it if someone came asking. “I'll take that check.”

  
  


` _Bill is asking the panel to identify General MacArthur's famous cat._ `

  
  


“I guess you can go,” says the detective, after reading over Dick's answers for the third time. His shirt is half-tucked, his nails are all chewed to the quick. Ragged edges. He has not looked Dick in the eye once during the interview.

Dick doesn't like him.

“You know, you hear things about that family,” he continued, still absently paging through his file. There was dirt under the nail of the thumb he licked to lift the pages. He glanced up. “Hot tempers. Rumors of some bad business with the father years ago, it all hushed up.” He rubs his fingers together over the table meaningfully, the universal gesture for a payoff.

Dick thinks of the few times he's seen Nix lose his temper. A lot of noise and commotion, but in the end he always only ever hurt himself. He says, “Perhaps it skips a generation, because that's not Lewis Nixon”

“Sure. Well – you let us know if the big man decides to show up.”

He stands and buttons his jacket. “You'll be my first call,” he says. He is lying to the police.

The sergeant switches off the radio as he passes him on his way out of the station.

  
  


` _Was this an object famous because of the person to whom it's connected?  
Yes.  
Was he a man?  
Yes._ `

  
  


He'd thought the diner quiet, but stepping outside cuts off the gentle chatter of the radio, the faint clatter and hiss from the kitchen. Outside it is still too early in the year for crickets. The diner is off the main drag, and not many cars are interested in stopping at this time of night anyway. Just Lew.

The silence follows him the ten steps to his car.

Inside, he squints in his rearview mirror and turns on his headlights. The low beams dash up against the windows of the diner, bleaching out the motionless figures of the waitress and cook. They look like a clockwork display wound down.

Car's barely a year old and already it's shifting rough. Gearbox, transmission? Not his field of expertise. The list of objects that need caring for in civilian life is endless and exhausting. He doesn't miss the Army, but you couldn't match that power of delegation. You owned nothing, but there was a man to look after the vehicles, the food, even your laundry.

 _Sounds an awful lot like Communism,_ he might say to Dick, if he was here.

_It's a miracle you were only demoted the one time._ Dick wouldn't actually say that, but the Dick in his head always cut a little deeper than the flesh and blood man. Both could be relied upon in a crisis, though.

He reverses slowly out of the gravel lot and merges back onto the dark, tree-lined road. If there is a motel around, surely there will be a sign.

His finds his pulse is racing a little. Too much coffee for the late hour, what was he thinking, this isn't Normandy and he isn't getting any younger. Without looking away from the road, he pats the seat beside him, a practiced grope, and locates his flask.

And for a while it's just his poorly-maintained body in his poorly-maintained car, and a solid white line telling him to stay within the proper bounds.

  
  


` _Is it something that somebody smokes?  
Yes, yes, a lot of people did – but it's not famous because of the people who smoked it.  
Oh.  
That's eighteen questions...  
Was it a type of cigarette?  
No._ `

  
  


He pulls off at the first motel he comes upon. It's a small, L-shaped affair, every room either a single or a double squeezed into the space of a single. There are only two other cars in the lot; he parks at the opposite end, as far away from the others as he can, and walks the silent length of the building to the darkened front office, where he rings the desk bell on the open window ledge. After two minutes of applying himself assiduously to this bell, a light finally comes on in the office. The blinds are hauled up and a woman with her hair in rollers pokes her head out.

She looks him over with a flinty gaze. He puts his hands in his pockets.

“Charge is for a full night, don't matter if you stay three hours.” She says it like she'd prefer he didn't stay at all. He's never been to one of these roadside joints that was ever any different.

“That's fine.” He smoked two cigarettes in the past ten minutes, so he's at least pretty sure his breath doesn't smell too strongly of the whiskey. But he speaks quietly all the same.

“Single or double?”

“Well – number twelve, if you can manage.” He jerks his head to the lot. “I'm already parked.”

“If I can manage,” she repeats, not quite under her breath. She spins the guest registry across the ledge and he passes a few crumpled bills in turn. He scrawls in a fake name and hands the registry back; she tosses a small key down and their business is complete.

“Hey,” he said suddenly, as she moved to drag the blinds back down. “Room has a phone?”

“Twelve does,” she says, after glancing at something pinned to the wall next to the window, “but long distance will cost you.”

It always does.

  
  


` _Was he in anyway connected with the government?  
Yes.  
Was he in the executive branch of the government?  
He came on to that, yes. That's eight.  
Was he military?_ `

  
  


Dick doesn't turn on the lights when he lets himself back in the house. It feels smarter not to illuminate all the unoccupied space; a contrary feeling. In the war he might've been killed over such an impulse. But he stands in the doorway of the kitchen looking at the clean ashtray sitting on the table and knows it isn't an assumption. The house is empty.

They haven't had dinner together in three weeks. Lew was at work, or out drinking, or maybe he just didn't eat. Dick thought he knew the difference between the times he needed to let his friend alone with his thoughts and when he needed to talk. Maybe he was wrong, maybe he miscalculated.

He moved finally from the doorway, hauling his jacket off and settling it on the back of a chair. He clenched his hands over the backrest. Pausing again because what else was there for him to do? He always hated waited to hear back about his men.

A box of light with the shadow of their houseplants carved out appears on the wall in front of him, reflected from the mirror in the next room. It bends and progresses along the wall but abruptly disappears halfway to the corner.

A passing car's headlights always make it to the corner.

In three light steps, Dick is at the window behind the drape. He angles a look out to the dark street and sees a police car parked half a block up the perpindicular street opposite the house.

 _Routine,_ he thinks with slight cock to his jaw, spite sitting ready in the space between his teeth. _Right_.

Behind him, the telephone shatters the silence. Once, he might have jumped at the sound. He crosses the floor in four quick light steps and picks up the receiver. And then the house is no longer empty, because it's Lew, Lew rasping in his ear, sounding close enough to touch:

“Dick.”


End file.
